If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

I have not had this game for long, but I think I can feel the good, bad and ugly about it now.

This is really I game I want to immerse myself completely in, and be a huge fanboy about! Love it to bits, want everyone to get into and enjoy.
But today has shooken the experience largely.
And I don't really know where to go from this point on.

It feels very bad, because I love the mechanics of this game extremely well. But today shed some light on some things that just are not very ok to me, and the group I played with.

I never really bothered with the original Zombicide and joined this ride recently, because of Black Plague. The one thing that kept me from the original was the dreaded "auto hit survivors" rule, which is fixed to an acceptable and evil/exciting nail biting expience as only misses let you hit friends now. I like how evil it feels and how much of a gamble it can be to save friends from afar.

I love the mechanics of the scale with xp. Nobody is that likely to fall far behind, as you spend time trying to even out XP between survivors. It's a beautiful thing.

All in all, the base set felt a little short on some things, like only having 2 vault weapons, feels like you got cheated somehow. And that it is only something kickstarter people get. Or tracking down the mini boxes that only confuse me more than seem like something I want to cherry pick, no, I want small boxes and big boxes, proper sets to add to the overall experience.
Things that go seamless and just... works! Smooth.

The main box felt like it was just a few steps from perfect. A bit too simplistic, maby a new sort of enemy or a few other special infected (aboms and necros) to give it that extra level of trickiness to it.
The expansion wulfsburg was the first thing that came to my mind, obviously.

But oh boy, here is where the problems started to show up...
First of all, we had a huge issue with assigning characters for a group of 4 players. As EVERY mission require 6 characters. And no official advice on how to fix things like this... for playing with less than 6 players.
With 3 players, we just picked 2 characters each and were fine by it. But 4? Everyone get a character, but 2 players only get 1? Seems lame...
Of course, with the wulfsburg expansion you get more characters so everyone can have more. But having that many, 8, only seem like it would make the game drag on for too long. With even longer extended spawn phases...

We tried to house rule something...
What if, we are 4 players, everyone get ONE character, but we get 2 extra starting equipments to compensate. That turned out to not work so well as having locked player turns sabotaged so much.
So we did, how about, we play like this, but pick character order freely?
Still didn't work so well...
Or, characters dying at 4 hits instead of 3? No, that seems way too "house rule-ish", and I really hate everything that has to do with house ruling, if it's not referenced as an alternative rule in the official rules.
It feels like, if you don't play the way as intended, the game is broken. And you are messing around with balance and alterning game flow in ways you probably don't think about at first etc.
Or how about, the 2 characters we don't use, are used as respawns for people who die? If you die, you draw a new character and place him at the starting zone, being level 1 and all. (xp ad 1)

It never felt smooth like this... and difficult with compensating being 2 characters down from the required 6+ to play the quest.

Then, when someone died, they were out of the game... probably the worst thing in the game, especially if you only have one character, and a game that has a super un-even balance where one wrong draw (with wulfsburg) can easily make you die, especially with woldbominations and wolfs spawning in bundles of up to 6 per spawn card!!!

The whole game with wulfsburg is super flawed overall.
The wolfbomination take over the game, everything is about HIM! All you do on blue, if bash the nearest door you can find, stay there as many rounds as you possibly can, and loot the crap out of the deck. You need to find at least 2 ways of dealing with health 3 enemies. Maby 2 torches and 2 dragon biles, or one of those new super unbalanced weapons. That feel very exaggerated and doesn't make it feel very allright as they are way too good compared to the rest of the stuff... it feels like equipment you should obtain from, maby the vaults. Or from something else... not just random loot, where you find tons of other mediocre or more coherent equipment.

It seriously feels like a lot of the wulfsburg equipment were meant for vaults, but it got so messy with the wulfbomination they had to be put into the deck instead.

Ok so people really hated how you had to play the game to be able to win at it. You horde items, possibly taking up to 30 minutes, just farming items to have equipment to deal with wulfbomination, then when you have all the OP gear, everything become a cake walk instead...

It feels very incomplete in this way, and everyone is probably using the torch "abuse", right?
You all stand in one spot, one player start, search, draw 2 cards, trade, give the torch to someone else. That player start, search and draw 2 cards, then pass the torch on... continuing like this until you all fill your inventories and discard all bad equipment.
This seriously is a very poor thing to have in a game like this.
The way looting works, has just turned out to be one of the things we hate the most. As there is NO limit to how many times a single room can be looted, instead of encouraging moving around, as the game surely is built to be, to loot different places!

I didn't actually feel this problem that much with the core box... as the extreme focus to find items was not as strong when there were no overpowered abominations on crack moving 3 spaces as a time around.

So I started to feel another flaw with the game as of all this... it feels very disjointed, like you are missing something. Like the expansion is incomplete, that I don't own all the stuff "I was supposed to have" from all the exlusives from kickstarter and what not... like the game experienced made with wulfsburg has taken those extras into heavy concideration with what you get.
And I start to feel angry... like, I love kickstarter, but this just doesn't feel right... am I completely out in the water with this one or what? I just don't feel like I should have this feeling with a proper expansion, that it should provide a more soild, balanced experience than this mess we are facing.

Maby not enough of you out there are experiencing this from this certain point of view. With many of you most likely owning the extras.

But I simply don't know how to fix all of this. Right now, I feel like, maby excluding wulfsburg expansion completely... even though I think it will be a bad thing, it would probably fix more problems than it created.

I am currently waiting for the Green Horde game, which make me very worried aswell. As I feel mixing the core box with that one, will most likely create equal kind of problems, and maby they don't mix so well. Just adding everything together.
Will deck balance, amounts of cards in the loot deck create an even flow of cards, that feel relevant and exciting? Will there be more cards in the vault? And the vault deck feel balanced too with all this?
Will the new hord mechanic work, if it is "watered down" with all the original spawn cards? Or will there be too little of the "horde building" going on, to make it just feel like a side thing, than what it is supposed to be?

I am overall very confused with this game now. I want to hear peoples opinions and tips. As I myself don't really know what I am supposed to do.